My thoughts and experiments on various computing topics. Thales used to be my domain name, I might yet resurrect it someday.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

XMLite?

So, just for fun, I decided to code the GoogleHealth client in Adobe AIR. Using the embedded sqlite database allows for a nice persistence of the 'session' variables, but here we also run into a small issue: since communication with GoogleHealth is done via XML - which, BTW, demands feeding the XMLHttpRequest output into DOMParser for a more natural processing - and there are large XML documents to be passed between the cloud and the client (e.g., the notice template and the other CCR data) it would make a lot of sense to use a XML database such as xDB. But, AIR is JS-based, hence no easy JDBC access, so the only solution would seem to be using SQLite's Virtual Tables as a gateway into xDB. Not sure it is doable - it probably is, but not worth the effort (VTables need C-API coding, xDB is Java-based... etc). Just another example of the impedance difference problem, this time at the data communication layer, and an illustration of how global data connectivity is still far from being achieved.